Podcasting: Evaluating Your Podcast
Karl Kasca
If you have a podcast, then you'll need to keep these 11 questions in
mind to assure your podcast listeners/viewers will have the best
possible experience. And if you don't have a podcast yet,
then read these 11 questions to assure that your podcast will address
them one way or another.
Note: These blog posts at Karl's AttractMoreVistitorsBlog.com
were posted to apply to either websites or blogs (and blog posts).
Since
you might have a Podcast, or be considering starting a Podcase, we
thought that you should be
aware of these points and consider them either when designing your new
podcast, or when evaluating your current podcast.
11 Quick Questions for Evaluating Podcasts
Note: For the complete
(full text) for the blog post, go to the link above.
- Is the ultimate* volume of your podcast
recordings high enough?
- Ask yourself: "Who
are my Customers and Why do they Buy?"
Applied to podcasting: Think of it this way, where
might your typical listeners (consumers) listen to (consume) your
podcast)?
- Is it somewhere like the gym,
where there's lots of noise pollution from TV's, loud mobile-talkers,
loud talkers, clanging weights, and whooshing flywheels?
Or is it on a walk, where there's the sound of
cars/traffic, street sweepers, garbage trucks, etc.?
- What device/software will they listen with?
- Is your lead-in bumper music or big-voice
announcer promo much louder than your voice so the listener
needs to turn the volume up to hear you? Or is it smoothly equalized?
- Are your guest interview calls and/or call-in
questions (on or off-line) equalized so that one is barely audible and
the other is much louder?
- Do you have show notes with links so
listeners who can't write while listening (e.g., driving) can
still access your valuable content?
- Do you have transcripts of your
podcasts?
Tip: One
no-cost way to do this is to use another microphone (e.g., a
headset mic) and route it to another computer with built-in (free)
voice/speech recognition (e.g., Windows XP or Vista) software so your
words will be automatically typed into Microsoft Word (or OneNote) as
you speak. Of course, currently this only works well if there's one
person speaking. See these resources for more on this:
Audio transcriptions and annotations with
OneNote
How to transcribe any audio on your PC
- And you can just use MS-WORD instead of OneNote.
- Assuming you'd like a free solution, rather than buying
Dragon Naturally Speaking, of course.
NOTE:
We'll have a article/video dedicated to explaining how to do this in
the future.
- If you do a video podcast do you offer an MP3
version as well for those who are just listening to your podcasts
versus watching them?
- If your listeners subscribe to your RSS feed
and download/synchronize your Audio podcasts to their devices,
do you try to avoid inserting a long (large file
size) Videocast which might blow-out their storage/memory when they
auto-sync their feeds to their devices (Yikes!)?
- Do you have some sort of consistent naming
convention for your file names so your podcast will make sense when
viewed in music player or File Explorer?
ARTICLE DATE: 04/21/09
REVISED DATE:
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Podcasting: Evaluating Your Podcast
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