You’ve worked hard to create a podcast. Your content is unique, enlightening, and informative. Why wouldn’t you want to make your content as sharable as possible? You should by transcribing your podcasts!
If you’re reading this, you’re considering transcribing your podcasts. But that would be another step in production on top of all the other work you do. You’re not willing to take it on “just because.” If we said you could reach a bigger audience, would that convince you to transcribe your podcasts? How about if we said you could improve your listeners’ user experience?
What if we said there was a total of eight reasons why you should start transcribing your podcasts right away?
Well…that’s exactly what we’re saying. Here are the eight reasons why you need to transcribe your podcasts:
Reason #1: Converting your podcasts to text is really simple
The underlying reason to transcribe all your podcasts is because there’s really no drawback to doing it. Sonix has built the world’s first speech to text editor. Just upload your podcast’s mp3 file and Sonix will quickly transcribe the podcast to text. With affordable transcription services such as Sonix and plenty of help out there to get it done, transcription can be as simple as giving the right person the “green light.”
The simplicity of episode transcription is truly mind boggling next to the advantages it brings. Keep reading to see exactly how good this one, simple act can really be for your project.
Reason #2: Improved listener experience with a transcribed podcast
Your listeners (or, for online purposes, “users”) are the reason why you’re doing this podcast in the first place. You want more listeners, and you want them to get something out of your content.
Every user has their own preference for consuming content. Providing text transcripts of the ready-made content is the secret to tap into the audience who wants to read instead of listen, or even read and get deeper into your content to better understand it while they listen.
Reason #3: Let your users skip around in your podcast by clicking on the transcript
This one goes hand-in-hand with the previous reason. Podcasts are great for listening to in the background while working out, driving, and doing other on-the-go things. For the person looking for the visual aid, however, or the user who scrolls through articles when headphones aren’t an option, you can still get your message out loud and clear to this audience.
Publishing your episodes with a listen option next to a text article spreads your content out across a more attractive layout that will be accessible to every user. Best of all, when users look for a specific topic you touch on in a longer episode, a transcript gives them the option to search and jump ahead.
Reason #4: Speed up your podcast production process
You spend time thinking up topics, interviewing people, drafting commentary and recording and producing your podcast. If you work at a radio station or a podcast studio, you’ll want to transcribe your radio show or podcast. That way, you don’t have time to write extra content, but you want that SEO lift from regular updates to the website and fresh text on the page.
Podcast transcripts give you the easiest written content without having to write blogs on top of podcast production. Just publish your transcripts on the blog with a link to the podcast recording, and that’s an immediate check off your list.
From content planning to performance measurements, transcripts also help you keep better record of what you’ve talked about and how each topic has performed.
Reason #5: Improve your podcast’s SEO performance
There could be thousands or even hundreds of thousands of users out there looking for the topics you discuss. If they can’t find it, however, your content has failed its purpose.
“Findability” is the concept of making sure the value-added content you produce can be discovered easily by those who are searching for the answers or information you provide. Search engines are going to crawl a transcript word-for-word, not an audio or video file.
According to American Life, inbound traffic by search on their website increased by almost 7% with the simple addition of an audio transcript page.
Reason #6: Improve your podcast’s web accessibility
Beyond the basic pillars of good SEO, podcast transcripts also get your information to audiences with limitations on what kinds of content they can consume. This includes deaf or hard-of-hearing users and even those with ADD or other disorders who struggle to listen to a podcast and take away its key messages.
Reason #7: Share your podcast on social media in seconds
They say that imitation is the greatest compliment. In the 21st century, now the greatest compliment is sharing.
You want more people to share your content so you can reach other people just like the users who shared. It’s how your content snowballs and how you create your “tribe” or niche. Getting your podcast shared is the ultimate achievement, and it relies on you having written transcripts so users can share the specific part of your episode that called their attention.
Reason #8: Make your podcast content more discoverable by listeners worldwide
Podcasts already cross borders anywhere that there’s internet. To cross into audiences of other languages, however, you need to have transcripts of your episodes so users can employ in-browser and manual online translation tools to access your content.
Audio and video content are the chosen medium online today. For example, 88% of users spend more time on a website with video than they do on a website without.
However, the written word is still an essential tool for your content to do its job: communicate.
Content can be easily extracted from audio transcripts and converted into killer blogs and resources by way of transcripts. Those resources can include gated offers, member-only materials, training products and more. If all you’re doing is recording and uploading your podcasts without providing a transcript of the material, you’re missing out on what your content could really do.
This one, simple strategy can get you these eight benefits above.
Believe us—marketing and content creation is rarely this simple. But today, you have the chance to kill eight birds with one stone. Start transcribing your podcasts right away, and you will enjoy all these benefits and more.
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