I have made a few posts about Podcasting lately and have combined them into a free eBook for your downloading pleasure.

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How you can use this eBook:

• For your own reading pleasure.
• To giveaway to your email list members.
• Use in Internet Marketing Giveaways – Click Here to view a list of Current Giveaways.
• Add to your Blog and giveaway to your readers.
• Offer as an Bonus to your own products you are selling.

Click Here to Download Podcasting Secrets Unleashed

The Do’s

• It should be Professional

Where you are podcasting from— be it your garage or a corporate boardroom— is not a factor at all. There is no reason for your podcast not to have a professional sound and feel. Software that can be used to filter noise from the background of your audio clip and increase its clarity is easily available on the internet. Hearers will not bear with bad sound quality. With the wide range of cheap software and hardware offered nowadays, there is no justification for you not to offer good quality audio podcasts.

• Transcription

   

You should always 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 while they listen to your podcast. If you do not wish to waste space on the main page with detailed descriptions, make sure you have alternate pages where these details can be viewed. The link or option must be provided on the main page.

• iTunes Support

With new automated gadgets like FeedForAll it is easy to add iTunes in the podcast support system. By adding your podcast to the iTunes media gallery, you will ensure a huge exposure for your product. With the massive audience and distribution that iTunes has, most podcasters who do not target this option are big fools.

• Content

Though audio quality is extremely important, the matter should not be neglected in the effort to rectify that. What you need to communicate is equally significant. You must offer content that is detailed, informative, instructive or engaging.

• Subscription to your Podcast Feed

   

In order to remain informed about how your audience will react to your podcast, you must subscribe to your podcast feed.

The Don’ts

• Straying

Make sure you don’t stray away from your topic of discussion much. If your podcast deals with cooking it would be inadvisable to make it a raving outburst about your political perspectives. You might interest a few listeners, but since your podcast should ideally deal with cooking as it would claim, most of the visitors would be interested in that. There are innumerable podcasts about political opinions. You will simple lose clients. Focus is indispensable for keeping listeners hooked on.

• Rambling

Don’t linger unnecessarily on a single point. No one will tolerate redundancy and rambling. Unfilled silences or unsure “umms” and “errs” will only bore listeners and you will lose them fast. You have to keep the show active. Always use audio editing software to remove dead air or repeats. It will give your podcast a professional feel.

• Forgetting Meta-Data

It’s essential to include appropriate keywords and jargon in your podcast feed title and description. This will assist listeners in locating your podcast.

• Skimping on Bandwidth

There is nothing more humiliating than networking a large listening audience and then failing to manage the bandwidth loads. Ensure you have a dependable web host that can handle your show’s bandwidth. Bandwidth and accessibility are essential to a podcast’s success.

• Ignoring your Audience

Never ignore your listeners. Create an interface where you can communicate with them and vice versa, whether it is a blog, through emails or even a forum. Always heed to what they say, and more importantly, to what they are not saying.

Constantly regulate and observe your web logs and subscription levels and bandwidth to find out when a show becomes a hit. By using good podcasting methods, you will definitely be a success in the field. These simple guidelines will assist you immensely when you start out.

You may use it to remind yourself what you said, for a blogpost, for comments, for further research. Often it is hard to remember everything that was said during an interview. So, in all these situations, a transcript of the show helps.

Reading a transcript of the show helps you realize the mistakes you made, be they grammatical errors or flaws in your interviewing skills. A transcript can also help you see whether your ideas flow logically. So, after reading a transcript, you can improve your diction and technique, preferably before your next podcast.

You can also use the text of the transcript to promote your podcast. Quote a guest who said something interesting, use segments for comments, generally publicize your podcast by using bits of the thing itself.

You can also sell the transcripts as premium content, either individually, or as an e-book; or offer it to your paying subscribers.

Reading transcripts makes it easier for you to avoid repeating topics or questions on your show.

Reading is usually faster than listening to audio files. So organizing shows by topic is faster if you are reading the transcripts.

Potential guests who may not have the time to listen to your show may prefer to read transcripts to realize what awaits them.

The transcripts, rich in relevance, can also be used as content on your website.

You can e-mail your subscribers the transcripts, along with information about your products and website, thus further connecting with them.

The deaf people, who use the Internet, need not be ignorant about your show if you present it in a format accessible to them-the transcripts.

You can send the transcript to non-web-based publications and get it published as an article-thus increasing your audience and getting paid.

Uploading the transcript will make the audio-content accessible to search-engines, which often cannot ‘read’ it.

Listening means that your audience has to remember or jot down the information you provide about url-s, etc. But reading your transcripts means that they can immediately click on a link if they find it interesting. And this, in turn, will make them more active.

As podcasting grows more active and popular, you may find that maintaining transcripts of your shows allows you to be more efficient and erudite, build your audience, rank higher with search engines, and even earn extra money.

The interview, where you can interview a single, or several person(s) who are expert in the subject your podcast involves.

The call-in show, where people phone in and the host talks to them. This is good for themed shows. For example, callers can ask for help with studies or medicine or cars, and, though the host is answering their questions, the information given out is likely to interest those who are interested in the subject.

The monologue works well if you are a good speaker with interesting things to say, because this format allows you to basically speak about any topic. However, in a lecture hall, your audience has the option of simply not listening. So, though the monologue is possible only in podcasting, it can also quickly wane.

The dialogue, which is a more enjoyable form of the monologue, is also popular. Though a monologue can convey the same information a dialogue does, the dialogue, with two or more people, and several opinions involved, can break up the monotony and make debates and question/answer formats possible.

The conversation differs from the dialogue as it is more informal and free-flowing. While there are some great samples available on the Internet, it should be remembered that as conversation-style shows are unscripted, it is harder to maintain high-quality.

In podcast versions of seminars/conferences, when the speaker talks into the microphone, it is transferred into MP3 format and made available for downloading. If the seminar requires a lot of images, the audio is not much help, and, in fact, this format is pretty hard to listen to, but they help if one has not attended the real thing.

The quiz show is an interesting format. Some podcasts tell you the question, play music while you think of the answer, and then reveal it.

News magazine format is interesting, with channels like CNN putting their headlines in podcast format. Like TV and radio news broadcasts, the podcast reel off the headlines and have one or two feature stories followed by smaller stories.

There are, of course, many more types of podcasts. But a combination of these is likely to guarantee a good show.

The entire method may seem to be difficult but if you check it closely, it is not the case. Also consider yourself lucky that today you have a number of incorporated podcast publishing platforms to select from, which makes the process pretty simple.

To begin with, you have various kinds of podcast hosting platforms. A very common one is the characteristic web-hosting platform. Blog software could be fixed on the server to get it in a point and click podcast publishing platform.

An incorporated platform like the podcast hosting services includes blog software with disk space and bandwidth. Superior platforms include metrics that are essential for podcast promotion.

A podcast publishing platform has three major fractions:

Podcast folder administration

A website server has to offer a minimum of one way to upload and control files. A very common method is by File Transfer Protocol (FTP), or website based file controller, WebDAV file structure or included file controller, which is contained in blog software.

Podcast location and page administration

Any web publishing platform will do this, but a blog solves the hassles and keeps you from handling HTML codes. If you know how to use email, you know more than enough to publish a podcast episode page using a blog. Another benefit of a blog as a publishing platform is that it is automatically archived, indexed by blog search engines and includes an internal discussion for individual posts as well as remotely through track backing.

Podcast data production

The last section of a podcast publishing platform is for producing data that are podcast compatible. This is done automatically by the blogs. Several bloggers don’t they are generating a feed with their blog but this is the key aspect of every podcast.

For this reason, blog has become the most popular podcast publishing platform. With the one-click blog installation feature on most hosting accounts, now everyone can build a podcast blog easily.

After that, as a podcaster, all you have to do is just uploading the podcast file, typing episode notes, and specify the file you want to enclose as a podcast. Click publish, and you are done publishing the notes and also the podcast feed.

That’s it. While you can take the hard ways to publish a podcast, a blog allows you to achieve exactly this — perhaps with fewer errors than to do it manually — more easily.

A video podcast was always available as an option.  What happened with Apple was that such video podcasting got moved into a totally new dimension.  This new level of podacsting was invented on the iPod.  Now apart from audio podcast video podcast thus has become extremely popular and anyone can share any videos they want to.

What you need initially to make a video podcast is primarily a video camera to shoot with.  In fact it helps further if you have a digital video camera so that you would not have to convert the footage to a digital format.

You have to make sure that what you are shooting is really worth shooting. On the quality of the footage depends the success of your podcast.  What kind of footage works?  Try and go in for as many close shots as possible as the essential nature of the podcast video has to be compatible with pod screens.

The wide screen mode is thus best avoided and the standard mode the most preferred one.  There is no point in trying to build in some insane amount of details on your video as the small screen might not support it just as it would not support fast motion and high contrast video.  Try and shoot many short length features rather than a full film.  Thus you make proper use of bandwidth and battery on the camera.

How to compress your film for web viewing or pod viewing?  With a MAC you have everything you need for such purposes on which you could use iMovie HD6 by following the set of links, FILE, Export, iPod, Share. On a regular PC one could install QuickTime Pro- 7.0.3 or higher versions.

To proceed, follow links Export, Using Quick Time Conversion.  Now you have a *.m4v file which is easily uploaded on the web.  You could use other software like, Spasm Software’s Podner or Sorenson Squeeze.

It is essential to fit your movie with a description.  This will help viewers to search for your movie.  On the latest iMovie software you would merely have to drag the file to iTunes and join the Info Tab.  File the necessary information after this.  On a PC you could proceed via creating an XML document or file. Upload your file online after this.

Now, you are ready to reach out to huge numbers of people with your video podcasts.  You could do this via iTunes or a blog.  Choose a preferred way and go on sharing and video podcasting your way.

Before you can start thinking about recording a podcast, you need to get a few simple things ironed out.  What you need to figure out is what the basic structure of your podcast will be like, and the kind of content you are going to have.  Decide if you need to do interviews or record outdoors.  Plan well because it pays off in the end.

One of the important things that will play a role in the success of your podcasts is where exactly you are doing your recordings.  You will need to find a nice, quiet place which is free of noise and distractions.

Also, try and record in the same place every time as it will be far more convenient to keep all your expensive equipment in one place.  In case you are recording away from your office, you will need to find ways to cut out noise.  It is advisable to record in a quiet place, and use directional microphones.

Spending a little money on your equipment will help greatly in enhancing the quality of your recording.  In case you can’t find a noise-free physical environment, you can use a noise reduction software.

Before you go into your final recording it is advisable to do a few test runs to check if all the levels are set optimally.  When you start off, you may need to tweak your volume settings and microphone distance before you get the best configuration.

Many states have their own legal stipulations on audio recording.  You should find out about these before you start, so you don’t land in trouble.  At the same time, it is best to make it a general ethical principle to ask for consent before you record.

While you may have gotten your hardware in place for an interview recording, it is not enough.  You should also put in some preparatory time for the content of the interview itself.

Try and gather as much information on your interviewee and prepare a tentative list of questions.  But don’t restrict yourself to these questions alone and be willing to diverge, keeping in mind the need for an interview to flow smoothly.

And lastly, try and make your recording fun and lively.  Use some sound effects, voice inflections and an interesting program format that will ensure your audience does not get bored.

Use songs as fill-ins, develop a signature intro and outro theme that is easily recognizable.  Remember, more than anything else, podcasting is ought to be fun. It should be a personal expression that is fresh and unique and a labor of your love.

You need several tools to create a successful podcast.  What is special to podcasting is that it is essentially a tool-managed process.  For example, you need a computer to start with.  Then obviously you need some recording apparatus like a microphone.  Nowadays, there are variants of recording tools in the Apple iPod or even the Griffin iTalk microphone.  Thus, a computer and some recording device are essential for you to carry on with podcasting.

Other than these tools, nowadays with technological availability, mp3 recording and editing programs aid you in editing what you have managed to record.  Along with these there are also available software that help you correct errors made in the course of recording.

After having managed the composition and framing if podcasts you can resort to some hosting facilities to center your distribution.  There might be several avenues through which distribution can proceed and the most usual ones could be your blog or website or even through iTunes or RSS feed.  But to root all of this you have to have a host.

In fact if you choose RSS feed as the as the preferred mode of distribution and thus do not want the section of the audience population who do not use mp3 players to not be excluded from the feed, then it is ideal that for you have an RSS reader that’ll enable all of that.  This way you can also update your audience regularly via the RSS feed.

If in case you are trying to provide your audience with the option of listening to podcasts on some website, then you could use a streaming jukebox podcast player, thus allowing your audience to receive the feed in an mp3 format rather than switching to time-consuming downloads.  Thus direct access to the podcasts is available on your website itself with this tool.

The one tool that has revolutionized podcasting is iTunes.  It is not necessary to have an iPod to use iTunes.  Through iTunes both the distribution of podcasts all over the world and the reception from a wide variety of sources becomes a possibility.  Try and find out opinions about your podcasts from close friends who will tell you frankly what they feel about them.

Apart from other tools this is also a necessity because only through this will you see the point of doing all this or find out if the tools are working in the way you thought they would.  It should thus be an imperative to collect as much of opinion you can in the podcast before launching it.

Must Have Podcasting Tools

In today’s evolving technical market, a new tool is created nearly each day. Podcasting happens to be one of them.  If you’re not already acquainted with them, then wait for a while, in a few days they will hold you in awe.

People have certain private favorites regarding podcast tools.  There is no one tool that is the best.  Only the creators of the tools can make such claims.

People with varying likes want varying kinds of tools.  If the tools function as people want them to, they are perfect.  In that case people are not concerned about considering other tools.

Following are the kinds of software you need must have as a business podcaster.  One version will suffice.

Audio Editor

The software arrests tones and converts them into digital pieces in the hard drive.  Very sensitive refined acoustic software lets you revise sounds, intensify sounds, remove superfluous parts and unite melodies and other sounds into recording.

A no cost and multipurpose acoustic editor is Audacity.

Flash Audio Player

Each podcast chapter leaf must have flash audio player.  Then users may test the chapter that they want.  It is vital as some guests are not registered users.

Maybe they found the website by online searches or through some kind of advertisement.  When they cannot test the podcast content, they may not want to invest their time to download the whole chapter to simply get introduced.

Flash audio players are admired since around ninety percent of web browsers keep a test and guests could see the podcast on the page itself.

An example of a popular Flash audio player site is 1pixelout.net.

Stats Package

Metrics are essential for any trade.  Free stats package like Google Analytics lets you check the way people relate with your site.  With proper tracking, you will get a fair idea about the source and nature of your traffic which is absolutely essential for bringing in further development to your business.

RSS Reader

It can be Google Reader or Bloglines or FeedDemon, podcasters are data tools, which take in a huge amount of data.  Once you figure out their proper use, you cannot do without them.

RSS or newsreader is a great tool for finding product titles.  Then you will need to figure out the details of news and the blogosphere.  You may want to interact with those who talk of you.

Podcasts were thought to be the hobbies of computer freaks and people who spend hours in front of the screen trying to do everything possible with the available range of options.  Nowadays this medium has garnered sufficient attention in the corporate world with business concerns taking note of this unique device of communication and using it to the fullest to create advertising effects like never before.

Podcasts serve the basic cause of promoting your enterprise.  But this promotion can proceed via several avenues without making it look like too brazen an attempt to advertise your firm.  What is possible is intensive information sharing via podcasts that help your firm pass on all the relevant information to the customers without running the risk of over advertising.

Thus, podcasts can serve the dual role of advertisement for the company and service for the customer.  Examples would include medical firms offering health related advice and educational institutions providing weekly advice to students on podcast.

The further use of a podcast in a commercial enterprise is that it can be used to train employers and all they will need is an mp3 payer or a laptop to access the training information and thus go through it right there without going through elaborate training schedules.  This saves your money and your employee gets some time.

Like any other device, podcast comes with costs and expenses to be borne.  The nature of these expenses is particular to the product and in case of podcast you will need people with technical know how and along with people who will be the content on the podcast.  This cost could be managed by attaching costs to the podcast the customer views on your website.

Or you could start a service for which the customer receives podcast updates from you for a fee.  These measures really depend on the success of the podcasts or else the customer might just bypass it if he or he has to pay a price for it.

Podcasts are amazing innovations that you can put to good use to help your enterprise.  They could be used for advertising, passing on information, training employees or even for bonus customer service that you want to offer.

Given this wide range of things that a podcast could do for you, it can only be an asset to your firm and nothing less. But key to a better functioning of such apparatus is that you maintain high quality content on such devices and also do not really hold back the initial expenses that you have to bear on this.  The more promising the start, the better the results and consequences involved.  Use this device creatively and efficiently to get the best returns possible.

Podcasting for Online Business

When you are offering a product or service to prospective clients, the client should be acquainted with what you are offering as well as its traits or characteristics.  If minute details are given, the client’s decision can be faster.  This is why advertising is indispensable for generating sales and subsequent gains from sales.

The period for which an advertisement can be sustained on a visual medium like the television is greatly restricted because of the expenses.  The process of remembering can also not be relied on because of the limited duration of the commercials.  Podcasting for online business is a blessing for advertisers, internet marketers and web masters.

Extended functions for podcasting for online businesses can be applications like employee training, information dissemination, or even product demonstration.  Since podcasts can carry audio and picture files, they are remarkable aids for all business purposes and not just marketing alone.

Podcasting for online businesses is relatively much cheaper and most businesses can create in-house podcasts.  The only tools needed are a personal computer and some software, most of which can be downloaded free of cost.  Novel ideas and gadgets for podcasting are discovered almost daily and the internet serves useful in keeping us updated about these upgrades.

• Develop True One-on-One Relationships:  Though traditional advertising owns a very respectable place in the media world, podcasting allows the target client to get an idea about the face, voice and life of the product.  If a podcast is developed even moderately well, it gives the company an opportunity for genuine one-on-one face time with new as well as old clients.  The only effort is to give that primary amount of time required to develop and release the podcast.  Customers become acquainted with the company through that individual and a greater level of trust can be established.

• Create Anticipation for Future Communication:  We only need to witness the success of YouTube to understand how much the level of anticipation for more correspondence from the same distributor.  Average people are offering numerous opinions on sequential podcasts and videos.  Messages that are more creative reach hundreds of people within days because they become popular so fast.  This popularity has what is called a “viral impact” that traditional media can only dream of achieving.

• Measurability:  depending on which platform you need to host your podcast on, there are many ways of devising the client’s behavior in reference to the message displayed.  Like HTML email where links can be visited and judged for follow-through to the main offer, podcasts too can be scrutinized statistically to check how many people watched them and at what times.  Unlike the TV or radio that has passive recipients for the message, podcasts have an active audience that have voluntarily selected your display and are examining it attentively with genuine interest.  Measuring conversion rates for podcasting is relatively easier than for other kinds of mass media.

• Immediate Call to Action:  Though statistics case analysis are still being built, many anecdotal cases record a rise in scales, contact from prospects, people sought out for speaking appointments and rising mass media exposure due to podcast communication.  The justification for these triumphs is that for the 1-3 minutes that you engage your prospect, you have the chance to generate a compelling message that is not in competition with any other advertising agent.

Therefore, if you’re planning to develop your own podcast from the very beginning, the first effort you should make is to browse the internet to attain the latest features that have been added to this wonderful technology.  Once you are done with podcasting for online business, be ready for the shower of orders that will start coming in.

In podcasting, it is the subscriber who’s in control of the situation.  This is not the case with the radio.  The subscriber can select the materials that he or she gets according to his or her desire.  The user can download the required facts and then hear them at his or her leisure.  This makes podcasting significant to the subscribers.

Once the content is save in the hard disk of a specific user, he or she can hear it and also watch it on a wireless electronic gadget.  Thus, subscribers can listen to a podcast even when they are commuting.

People can now select the talk shows as well as debate programs that they wish to listen to and the time as well as the location can also be determined by the user.  This is rather helpful to people who wish to learn many languages as they can listen to them while traveling.

Additional lessons, point by point tutorial classes as well as strolling instructions can be listened to with the help of podcasts.  Podcasting is also helpful to all those who are blind and also the old because plenty of books are available in the form of podcasts, so that the visually impaired or elderly people can easily listen to the podcast form of their favorite book.

Podcasting can easily be manipulated by the subscribers.  They can keep feeds and also remove them according to their demands.  The subscriber handles podcasting completely by himself or herself and can also mark the podcasts that are most famous.  This entire system applied by the subscribers ultimately form a layer which marks the creative and exciting podcast feeds from those that are not so popular.

This method is slowly gaining a lot of popularity among businessmen.  Podcasting provides new types of audio material to be transported.  Podcasting is famous as a mode of interaction as it is cheap as well as time friendly.

How Can Podcasting Be Used

The techie freaks have now taken interest in podcasting.  But do we, here, really know how it works?  It is actually a form of transportation for online audio files with the help of an RSS feed.

Though podcasting is compared to radio, however a podcast provides more choices in material as well as programs in comparison to the radio.  Podcasting allows the user to access that very program which he or she wishes to listen to.  Users can choose their desired talks, enable that and hear it as and when they feel like.

The users can also save the audio files such that they can retrieve them at their chosen time.  Podcasting has successfully made people into radio celebrities in a manner similar to the method by which bloggers have now become reporters.

The Various Ways Podcasting Can Be Used:

1. Strolling trips that are self-conducted: Facts and materials.
2. Rhythm and Blues: Advertising bands, hence videos as well as talk shows.
3. Discussions: Corporation and institutional news, stocks news, sports news, other forms of news as well as views.
4. Coaching: Lessons and guiding facts.
5. Narrative plot: Stories for young ones as well as the handicaps.

The syndication of audio medium via RSS feed is Podcasting.  It functions in a way that resembles the conventional RSS feed reader or news accumulator.  Well, the distinction lies in the fact that this involves the transportation of an audio file.

Here you do not have to input material into the RSS feed reader or aggregator.  You can simply hear all that is stored in the feed with the help of a reader or accumulator (often called aggregator), provided it allows podcasting.  You can also hear them with the help of your ipod or your computer or even your music player.  It is not necessary to use an ipod just because the term was coined mainly for an ipod.

Websites often contain podcasts and hence it requires just a click on the link.  Certain conventional RSS readers such as FeedDemons most recent beta now supports audio files.

The enclosure mark determines the podcast nature of the audio file and distinguishes it from a feed.  Consider this simply to be a mail attachment.

The “enclosure” mark is not a fresh invention and it has been for years since the mark has been incorporated in the RSS v2.0 version.   However podcasting became a rage only from the month of August, year 2004.

Webmasters are looking for innovative methods to enrich the internet with more facts and media files.  The most striking bit is the syndication factor as well as rise in the number of users.

People who listen to the podcasts benefit from this entire scheme as it is a method via which materials can be uploaded and the person who downloads it can completely negotiate the facts just the way he or she wants.  It is quite like the RSS. It gives you space to exercise your own discretion.