A Practical Guide To The Dos And Don’ts Of Podcasting

Podcasts are now essential to business due to the advantage of giving you authoritative presence. A podcast provides a format for sharing your expertise in your customer market and creating a connection with your audience. That’s because your voice as a presenter gives your audience a stronger connection with you than simply reading the information on your web page.

Podcasts are also a great way to communicate and easy to produce, whether you have a commercial location or a home-based business. And podcasts are fun. You can pretty much talk about anything, however, in terms of growing your business, there are some dos and don’ts that you should follow.

To achieve the maximum impact from your podcast and make it distinct from others, consider the following guidelines:

The Dos…

1. Have professional sound…

Where ever you’re podcasting from, such as a corporate boardroom, or your bedroom,  your podcast has to have a professional sound and feel to it. For example, people listening will not put up with poor sound quality, so you should use software that is available online which offer good quality audio that can be used to filter noise from the background of your audio clip and increase clarity.

2. Communicate quality content..

Though audio quality is extremely important, what you need to communicate is equally significant. Which means you must offer content that is informative, educational, instructive detailed and engaging

3. Provide a transcription…

It’s a really good idea to provide a transcript for your listeners or an option to view detailed notes in the description of your podcast content. This will assist your prospective clients either while they listen to your podcast or to review afterwards. Make sure you have space where the transcript pages can be viewed or provide a link as an alternative option.

4. Use iTunes support…

With new automated gadgets like FeedForAll it is easy to add iTunes in the podcast support system and by adding your podcast to the iTunes media gallery, you will ensure a huge exposure for your product. iTunes have a massive audience and distribution that for you as a podcaster is a big option for you to use.

5. Subscribe to your podcast feed…

To remain informed about how your audience will react to your podcast, it’s a must for you to subscribe to your podcast feed.

The Don’ts 

1. Straying from your podcast topic…

It’s important that you don’t stray away from your podcast topic of discussion much. For example, if your podcast deals with cooking or blogging, it wouldn’t be advisable to start talking about your own political perspectives because you will simply lose clients. You might get the interest of some listeners, but since your podcast should ideally deal with cooking or blogging as you promoted, claim, that’s the topic which most of your audience would be interested in. So, keep your focus on keeping listeners hooked on your podcast topic.

2. Rambling…

Don’t linger unnecessarily on a single point because your listeners won’t tolerate rambling. Unfinished sentences and silences or lots of “umms” and “errs” will only frustrate your audience  and you will lose them pretty fast. Which means you have to keep the show actively moving forward and will give your podcast a professional feel.

3. Forgetting to use meta-data…

It’s essential that you include appropriate keywords in your podcast feed title and description as this will assist those who want to listen in locating your podcast.

4. Skimping on Bandwidth…

Bandwidth and accessibility are essential to a podcast’s success and there is nothing more embarrassing than networking to a large audience and failing to manage the bandwidth loads. So, make sure you have signed up with a dependable web-host that can handle your show’s bandwidth.

5. Ignoring your Audience…

Never, ever, ignore your listeners and always take heed to what they say, and more importantly, to what they are not saying. And you need to create an interface where you can interact and communicate with your audience, and vice versa …whether it is a blog, through emails, a forum or a Facebook Group.

Finally…

By using these guidelines and good practice podcasting methods, you will definitely give yourself a much better chance of being a successful podcaster in your field.

Business Talk

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