EASY Podcasting: Building Web Traffic Through Expertise

Hello and welcome to Small Business EASY Branding Tips.  Brought to you by SSS for Success (EASY Brand Marketing Specialists), working to help Small Businesses Survive through EASY Sales. 

This week’s topic is: “EASY Podcasting: Building Web Traffic Through Expertise”.  In a previous post, I talked about “The Basics of Branding and Why Anyone Can Do It”.  In that post, I detailed the 4-Step Common Sense Branding Strategy that I think most small business owners should be aware of when seeking to create, build, and enhance their company’s brand.
Those steps were: 1^st: Determining & Defining Your Brand. Step 2: Researching Your Market and Positioning Your Brand to Capitalize on a Sector of it. Step 3: Launching Your Brand. Step 4: Managing, Monitoring & Tweaking Your Brand (Note: That’s “tweaking” your brand, meaning make minor revisions, not tweeting your brand, which is more so a function that occurs under Step 3).

In this week's post, I talk about how to use podcasting (or digital audio broadcasting) to build bring web traffic either to your blog or to your website, and to enhance your overall brand, so we’ll specifically be talking about Steps 3 & 4. 

Podcasting is like broadcasting your own radio show, that isn’t live, and people can choose to download it and listen to it at their leisure.

I recently got into podcasting and it’s an activity that I enjoy because it’s another way to connect to my audience, and I’m going to give a general overview as to how you can get started with EASY Podcasting. 

The first step towards having a successful podcast series, is to have a website or blog, just so your audience can have a central location to gather, and/or find your information if they choose to look somewhere else beyond their RSS reader.  You don’t necessarily need a website or a blog, but if your goal is to build your brand, then you should certainly have one or both.

Creating the actual podcast episode itself is something that requires 3 steps:
 

1. Creating the File: To create a podcast episode, you need to have a microphone, and audio editing software.  In order to record a decent quality podcast, I purchased the moderately priced Logitech ClearChat Comfort USB Headset, and downloaded the Audacity Free Audio Editor and Recorder with an MP3 encoder plug-in to allow me to export MP3 files.
2. Uploading and Storing the File: I upload and store my files on the web hosting and storage accounts I already have at my disposal, but an easier alternative to this would be LibSyn (short for Liberated Syndication).  While I don't use LibSyn personally, I would highly recommend it because it's economically priced (starting at $5/month and up), and they provide a lot of the tools you need to upload and distribute your podcast files.
3. Disseminating the file to RSS readers:  If you use LibSyn, this part will probably be taken care of for you, but if you choose to do it yourself, you can take your website/blog URL over to Feedburner and burn a Feedburner RSS feed, then submit it to iTunes, as well as the Microsoft Zune Marketplace.  My experience has shown the iTunes process to be easier and more user-friendly, and their turn around time for getting podcast episodes listed is great!

With your podcast episode recorded, uploaded, and ready for subscription, be sure to use Twitter and Facebook, and all of the other social media tools out there to bring attention to your blog, and encourage people to visit your site and hopefully subscribe to your content, if they find it helpful. 

There are certainly a variety of ways that you can go about setting up your own podcast series, and tons of helpful resources out there to get you started.  What I’ve talked about today is what I’ve done, but you’re more than welcome to check out the many websites and other resources out there on this topic.  For example, you can visit Cliff Ravenscraft's Podcast Answer Man website and check out his Podcasting 101 podcast that helped me learn the basics before I started podcasting.

Please keep in mind that we here at SSS for Success (EASY Brand Marketing Specialists) are always here to help with our Social Media & Technology Training Packages to help you get a better grasp on podcasting and all the variety of tools and resources that are out there, and how you can learn to use them for yourself to grow your business.

Note: Within the next few weeks, I’m going to have a podcast episode devoted entirely to questions and answers from you, my listening audience, so please submit your Small Business Branding Questions for that upcoming episode.  You can visit our website sss4success.com and go to the Contact Us page to submit your question, or reach out to us via email at “podcasts @ sss4success.com”, or finding us on Twitter (@sss4success), or leaving a comment below.  Don't forget to stop by our Facebook Fan Page and let us know you LIKE what we're doing.

Finally, if by chance, you would like to learn more about how EASY Sales can help your bottom line, then give us a call at 615-336-4325.

Have a great day!
Kindra Cotton



If the player above isn't displaying, or working properly, you can also download the podcast from iTunes for free! 

By the way, Transcripts are now available upon request.  If you want one, please email us at "transcripts[at]sss4success.com".